Monday, 1 March 2010

Having been off my feet recovering from surgery for quite some time last year and now again I have probably had more hours than most people to trawl round the internet. There is an amazing amount of information and inspiration for polymer clay artists out there. I am sure you all have your favourite blogs and sources of information (feel free to post a link in the comments to any of your favourites as I may have missed some).

I wanted to share a few blogs that aren't in English with you as it took me a while to come across them and then I was put off initally by the language problem - my French is rather rusty and not that technical anyway. Then I discovered Google Translate! To start with I loaded the web link into the google translate page everytime but then I found the translate button. If you scroll down to the bottom of this linked page you can find a button you can drag to your tool bar for your language. I now have the English one on mine and if I find a site that is in a different language I press the button and it translates it (often rather ammusingly but you can get the gist - cane is translated as duck in French by google )

So check out the French blog http://paroledepate.canalblog.com/ It is described as a 'living newspaper' of all things polymer clay. There are plenty of tutorials on this site, from artists around the globe.
In the Canes tutos archieve there are 7 pages, yes 7 pages!, of different tutorials of all sorts of canes.Polymer clay addict heaven!
They have even kindly translated some into English and these can be found on the translation__traduction page

The first tutorial on that page is from Nathalie is to make these beautiful extruder flowers as seen in some of these beads above. I have very briefly tried this with a few bits of scrap clay but without the Core Adapter as I don't have one, I replaced it with a disc with 7 holes in as shown by Galina in her Russian Blog (again that google translate came in handy!) Here is my first attempt.

Need a bit more contrast next time but they were the colours I had out at the time

1 comment:

The translations are always so funny aren't they? I was wondering if duck meant cane. Polymer Clay Canes on a Russian blog, translate into Plastic Sausages, which is my personal favorite! :-)

This extruder flower is sure a fun one to do. You are right about the colors needing contrast with each other. Because of the way they blend together, they can get a little lost, if there is not very much contrast. Same thing goes for regular Mod canes as well. That is why black and white end up such great looking extruded canes!

Thanks for the mention of my blog. The internet has become a wonderful resource for learning. It is wonderful that we can have such great ideas being shared so quickly all over the world like that. Would have been near impossible in the old days!

About Me

Hi
I am Cara Jane Hayman aka Surfingcat. I live in Bristol with my lovely husband and 2 (mainly) lovely children who are 5 and nearly 7 years old. They keep me busy and I teach in a local school 1 day a week but when I have a moment what I love to do is make things (oh and surf the internet). The surfingcat thing came about in the good old days when I used to do some real surfing - the wet kind!